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bsquizzato writes "The Associated Press is running a story about the CIA's Open Source Center: 'a team known affectionately as the "vengeful librarians,"' who work out of 'an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building' scouring social networks and other online media to keep up with the world's current events and opinions on American actions. This should come as no surprise, but it's quite interesting that President Obama is briefed daily on the latest hot topic tweets and Facebook posts."

Ignoring the mood of your country is often a pretty destructive thing for a politician to do. Really how much time do you think it would take to review say a page of information. Of course those collating are spending a lot of time but the expectation is a poltical should know the mood of the electorate, should pay attention to it and in reality should flip or flop which ever way they tell him to ie be a 'representative' politician and not a 'dictative' politcian.

[...] it's quite interesting that President Obama is briefed daily on the latest hot topic tweets and Facebook posts."

Not only interesting, but smart if he wants to get votes. Connecting with the public, and being able to converse on recent hot topics, or insert them into speeches, is a good way to get votes. It helps reduce the perception that he is disconnected from the people, which is an oft-heard complaint about those in Washington.

"That's why more drastic action, like the protests and beyond, must be taken."

Well, if we paid attention at election time and actually examined the candidates, we would, sadly, conclude that none of them can be trusted, and none of them deserve our votes.

Then we would pay more attention to the selection process, and would realize, sadly, that none of them can be trusted, and none of them deserve our support.

Then, perhaps, we would pay more attention to the media, and realize, sadly, that none of it serves us. And we would look elsewhere for such meager scraps of information as can be useful in selecting our political leaders.

All of which is a waste of time, since the majority in the U.S. will never care who they vote for, so long as they can vote for the one that promises they will not have to pay taxes and will taken care of by their government, for others will pay the taxes.

"And we would look elsewhere.." The previous three sentences were quite enough basis for some (many?) of us to realize that none of it is for our benefit. Monarchy, Communism, Theocracy, Democracy, and the rest are all designed for those that rule. Fortunately, Democracy's rule making process, up to recently, makes very hard to affect anything very positively or very negatively, really, so it gets my vote. And, no, I don't vote. The good news: Looking anywhere outside yourself for answers is waste of time.

All of which is a waste of time, since the majority in the U.S. will never care who they vote for, so long as they can vote for the one that promises they will not have to pay taxes and will taken care of by their government, for others will pay the taxes.

Yeah, that's the part I find really, really fucking strange. My dad will never be a millionaire, yet he votes Republican and defends their "no taxing the rich" strategy. That just doesn't make sense to me; "no taxing me" I get, but "no taxing someone taking advantage of me" just doesn't hit me the same way. Perhaps in 20 years or so I'll be going senile too.

Legalize marijuana? Marijuana is a dangerous drug that will make you freak out and jump out a third-story window.

I really hope that you are joking/trolling...

Anyone who still holds the belief that marijuana is either a) dangerous or b) a gateway drug needs to seriously read up on the FACTS...

And before the flaming begins, smoking is not the only way to ingest marijuana, so don't start spouting off crap about lung cancer - show me a scientific link between ingesting marijuana through mastication and any kind of cancer or illness. Oh, no luck? I can show you plenty of first hand reports of the BENEFITS. I will concede t

He's referencing the response of the Obama administration to a petition to legalize marijuana on it's petition website [whitehouse.gov].

The responses from the administration make it clear that website isn't about listening to the petitioners, but rather telling them why what the government is already doing is the right thing (and why you should just sit down and stop making a fuss, thanks). In the case of marijuana, their argument is painfully thin. They trot out the "marijuana significant use is a source for voluntary d

Maryjane a gateway drug? Well, could be. I smoked weed for six months before ever smoking tobacco - during my first acid trip. Did plenty of the psycho-active, -delic stuff for ten years, '67-'77, picked it up, laid it down. Only stuff to cause any probs at all to date are nicotine, alcohol, caffeine.

And yeah, ingestion works great for boo (takes more but lasts longer and is mellower - mind the dosage); used to powder leaves and buds in blender or pestle and use as ingredient for sauces, dressings, wha

It's also the root of The Problem - politics has changed into a game of trying to please the unwashed masses while painting the opposition as black as possible.

The people running the country should be concerned about doing it efficiently while solving the big problems (economy, energy, healthcare, debt, etc). Being leaders who get stuff done, leading the world by example. As it is they're more concerned about expensive suits, manicures and looking good on TV.

So the CIA is helping Obama stay on top of the latest trends that will help him converse on the latest topics?

Great. I'm so glad that tax dollars are helping politicians keep up with Facebook at Twitter. It would be bad enough of their staff was doing it. But the CIA? Come on now. I was under the impression that there are real, pressing issues to focus on. Issues like China and Russia coordinating organized, 24x7 penetration testing of anything and everything connected to the internet.

So the CIA is helping Obama stay on top of the latest trends that will help him converse on the latest topics?

Great. I'm so glad that tax dollars are helping politicians keep up with Facebook at Twitter. It would be bad enough of their staff was doing it. But the CIA? Come on now. I was under the impression that there are real, pressing issues to focus on. Issues like China and Russia coordinating organized, 24x7 penetration testing of anything and everything connected to the internet.

Well if its a secondary benefit to activities more in keeping with their primary mission why not brief the pres about public sentiment? As far as the Chinese and Russians using our networked computer as sex dolls, that's more of a NSA thing than CIA.

I doubt it. The CIA isn't supposed to, and generally doesn't bother, to collect the latest trends of opinion in the US. Frankly speaking, a modern US president should have better sources than the CIA for that. On the other hand, knowing what issues are trending in europe right now?? Or China? THAT is the CIA's business... Also, that said, I'm pretty sure that these things are just factors fed into the PDB and generally not line items, and certainly not line items that make the main sections. *shrugs*

This isn't used for figuring out his politics. Twitter and all this other social media BS is used for arranging protests against various foreign governments, and also to advocate terrorism. The guy we whacked in Yemen was calling for jihad based in part on a series of Youtube videos. Keeping apprised of these developments can be very useful, especially if they're figuring out where these various posts are coming from. If there's a movement arising in Syria, for instance, the US and NATO can step in to provi

Hey, I'm in favor of legalization myself (although I don't and wouldn't use) but I can't blame the administration too much for carrying out the will of the people. A referendum on legalization failed in California [go.com] - and that was California.

This is Slashdot. It was almost certainly the Marijuana response he was complaining about. For me, I'm very sick and tired of the stoners trying to hijack every internet political forum for their pet project - they seem very tense about it, too. That's probably because they're using the Internet at work and so not sufficiently stoned.

Or it could be that non-violent people are being thrown in jail in large numbers, and some of us have a problem with that. I suppose you don't care since it's not your problem, but what is your problem is the amount of money our government spends ruining people's lives.

They're all just justifications of the administration's existing policies. It's not a platform for interacting with the citizenry, it's a platform to lecture you about why the government is right.

Concern about software patents -> "That's the way the law works. Now we'll talk up our new patent law which doesn't address them."
Religion in the public square -> "The president mentioned you non-believers in his inaugural address, what more do you want?"
Legalize marijuana -> "The War on Drugs totally

I would politely point out that your statement implies that the rest of the world does not use social media ("after all, if they're mining social media, it must be domestic because foreign barbarians aren't as sophisticated as America in this regard"). Contrary to what you may have heard, the rest of the world does actively use it, and the CIA has too many headaches translating and spying on the rest of the world to worry about to be wasting time sorting through what America thinks about Kim Kardashian's d

One can only presume that there are more Right Wing tweeters than Left Wing or Centrist or tweeters, because ever since he took office he has been playing up to Right Wing sensibilities and corporate interests. Too bad that people like him would rather have a successful career than a moral conscience.

So I guess they have an astroturfing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing) department, as well. They spread positive stuff on America's actions in foreign social networks.

So I hope that the mining folks don't pick up something spread by their own astroturfing folks. Gee, wouldn't that be a major failure of intelligence gathering.?

So, first off, before it was called "astroturfing" it was already an old practice in the realm of geopolitics...it was called "propoganda," and everyone does it like crazy. It's not rocket science that you guessed at that, by the way...this is far, far, far from being either a news or secret.

If you read the article, you'll see that what they're doing is not just absorbing the messages, but looking at the information in the context of the sources providing them. And they aren't just looking at opinions, but at facts as well. In fact, I'd be shocked if they weren't fully aware of what other efforts were underway to improve the viewpoint on American activities, and cross-referencing to validate the effectiveness of those efforts. As well they should; that's part of what an intelligence organization is supposed to do, after all. Why do some people get so upset when the CIA does what the CIA is meant to do? If you want to live in a country that has no such apparatus, your options are extremely limited...I recommend Costa Rica or Luxembourg. At least what we're talking about here is nothing more than listening to what the rest of the world is saying, and paying attention to it...this is not waterboarding, extraordinary rendition, or reaper drone strikes. It's reading Twitter and Facebook.

As an anarchist [freetalklive.com], elected official [wikipedia.org], and member of a vaguely anti-government group [freestateproject.org], I've often wondered how big the dossier is on me. Either it's large, in which case it documents a whole lot of perfectly legal stuff I'm doing and is just a waste of bureaucrats' time, or it's small or nonexistent, in which case the bureaucrats are fail for missing a guy who you'd think would be on the list.

Getting myself elected seems contradictory to trying to "overthrow" it, don't you think? Long-term, I'd like it to whither on the vine and die. Nullification, followed by secession, OTOH, I'm pushing for rather strongly. Are either of those "overthrow"? 'cause we're making a lot of progress with the former, so how far off can the latter be...?

XXX seeks an Pattern/Trend (Life) Intelligence Analysis Team Lead to support the XXX at XXX A CURRENT TS/SCI CLEARANCE IS REQUIRED FOR EMPLOYMENT CONSIDERATION. CANDIDATES WITHOUT AN ACTIVE TS/SCI WILL NOT BE CONSIDERED.

The selected individual will lead a team of analysts involved with Pattern of Life (POL) issues. Duties include: plan and develop internal analysis strategies and participate in project/team meetings to provide innovative methods and assistance in social network analysis and presentation of the findings in support of other team members' analysis. Additional duties include: assemble facts and information from a variety of data sources and work products made available by various Federal, state, regional, and tribal enforcement and intelligence agencies; locates, synthesizes, and interprets large amounts of textual, financial, and technical data such as transaction records, financial/accounting statements, money service business records, and general business data, plus intelligence information reports, finished intelligence products, filtered real-time data feeds, directed-searches results, and task-specific, specialized data sources.

The candidate shall possess the following skills: Experience characterizing HUMAN terrain using raster and vector GIS data layers; Experience using ArcGIS or other tools to perform address geocoding; Experience using spatial multi-criteria/multi-objective evaluation techniques in an ArcGIS to conduct area limitation analysis and/or mobility modeling; Experience applying crime mapping, geographic profiling, animal tracking, or manhunting methodologies, methods, and tools to predict where and when an individual is likely to be in a future time and place; Experience developing and applying descriptive and inferential statistics to flows over time and space, including application of time series analysis, sequential data analysis, spatial statistics, or space-time statistics; Experience developing and maintaining geo-databases bases on facility and event locations and times, and other behavioral, cultural, or social factors that influence an individual's spatial decision-making; Experience developing new Pattern of Life support products and analytic techniques; Experience training non-technical audiences in Pattern of Life methodologies, methods and tools; Ability to write scripts/applications in ArcGIS environment using Python or Visual Basic to automated commonly used tasks or loosely couple existing software; Familiarity with the Lund school of space-time geography or other contemporary theories of space-time geography or spatial decision-making; Experience using statistical or spatial statistical software to pattern of life analysis, including CrimeStat, Tableau, SPSS, Statistica, S-Plus, or SAS; Experience using Geotime, Starlight, Inspire, Centrifuge.

Regarding spies.... from 1960s Mad Magazine: When we want to gather information on other countries, we employ intelligence agents. When another country does the same to us, we accuse them of using spies.

Why is this a surprise? Given the prominence of social media and public online forums in a lot of the unrest over the last several years, I would be disappointed in the CIA if they were NOT examining this data. Like every other intelligence source, the social media data alone won't provide a complete picture, but combined with other data gathered from more traditional methods, it can provide a real-time indicator of what is going on in a particular part of the world.

What? By those standards the fact that the CIA probably has people reading newspapers implies that they work for them too. The CIA probably reads Iranian government press releases too. Going through public domain information to find useful intelligence is exactly what they're supposed to do.

I thought they are all some kind of CIA shadow companies, and now we have the proof.

Why's this modded "Troll"? AT&T's been proved to leap onto its back and spread its legs for the NSA. This's no different. What surprise is there in knowing what DHS can do to Google whenever they want, regardless of what Sergei Brin might want.

Why do you sound so surprised that a government peruses information freely provided by citizens? Especially since we've seen that many "movements" (e.g. Arab Spring) started on these sites. Makes perfect sense to me.

You need to check with the dictionary what government is, who is paying their salary, who they serve, and what their job actually is. I will help you: "The Government" is not some alien or a person, and regarding the "constitution", it's only purpose is border control and war.